SAN FRANCISCO ART GALLERIES OPENINGS

FIRST THURSDAY - 05.03.12 - Part I

(with assistance from Kathryn Arnold)



Insurance company doesn't want to pay your art claim? Click Here.

***

Gallery Paule Anglim: Tony Oursler - top-down-bottom-up; Tony Labat - New Work.

Review by Kathryn Arnold: Amazing works with miniature video projections on sculptures, and also part of several 2D works. They feel like one's mind-- full of images and excerpts of images.

Comment by AB: Tony Oursler projects multiple miniature video images onto portions of strange little agglomerate sculptures. The results are completely surreal and guaranteed to reel you in and keep you looking. He's also showing a series of paintings that blend abstraction with portraits and figures, several with embedded video. For the video sculptures in particular, Oursler's show gets Pick of First Thursday. In the rear gallery, the headliner of Tony Labat's art and installation is a wild multicolor dress he created by combining bits and pieces of sewing patterns intuitively selected from his mother's accumulated collection. Definitely worth seeing.

***

Highlight Gallery: Benoit Plateus - Backpages.

Comment by AB: For the inaugural exhibit at their new downtown location, Highlight Gallery presents oversized cut and torn paper collages accented with original drawings courtesy of Belgian artist Benoit Plateus. Stop on by.

***

Stephen Wirtz Gallery: Marc Katano - Penumbra; Paul Schiek - dead men don't look like me.

Comment by AB: In the main gallery, experience large meditative abstractions on Japanese and Nepalese handmade papers by Marc Katano. In the side gallery, Paul Schiek reincarnates mugshots of Georgia prison inmates, originally taken circa the 1950s, by photographing them and then nuancing their haunting atmospherics. Schiek selects the images for the show based on similarities he sees between the prisoners and himself.

***

Fraenkel Gallery: Lee Friedlander - Mannequin.

Comment by AB: The premise is simple; the results are striking. Lee Friedlander photographs mannequins through the front windows of stores. The compositions part mannequin and part reflection, masterfully intertwined into anomalous mirages of urban life. The photographs have all been taken during the past three years. Recommended.

***

Gregory Lind Gallery: Barbara Takenaga.

Comment by AB: Barbara Takenaga creates meticulous mind-expanding cosmic starburst journeys that effortlessly transport you far from the mundanities of reality.

***

Brian Gross Fine Art: Pard Morrison - Recent Works; Adam Fowler - Hide/Reveal.

Comment by AB: Pard Morrison expertly assembles and patinates aluminum into optimistic polychromatic sculptures for floors and walls. Morrison tells me that each color on every one of his precision sculptures is individually applied. Nicely done. In the side gallery, Adam Fowler's bewilderingly circuitous cut paper collages will indubitably amaze. Saunter on by for a satisfying two-fer.

***

K. Imperial Fine Art: Amy Sollins - Moving Objects.

Comment by Kathryn Arnold: Works on paper in mixed media filled with intimate symbols and iconography creating personal narratives.

Comment by AB: Amy Sollins excerpts objects and memories from their contexts in her life and rearranges them in unconventional ways.

***

Addendum:

***

Here's a thought.... support the cause.

***

First Thursday - April 5, 2012

First Thursday - March 3, 2012

***